Is Every Man a Knave?

Conscience and Virtuous Character Reduce the Temptation of Knavery

In his essay “Of the Independency of Parliament,” first published in 1741, David Hume wrote that it is “a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.” To be a knave is to be motivated solely by one’s own gains and comforts, with no regard for the sentiments and interests of others and no scruples about the rules of right conduct.

Hume knew that humans are not knaves in any simple sense. Throughout his writings, he observed that people often prioritize moral uprightness over expediency. A sensible knave in an honest society knows that he can gain much through dishonesty—but such knavery is not the norm.

In contemporary developed nations, it is often not difficult to get away with dishonesty, fraud, theft, or even acts of physical violence. These transgressions occur, but they are not as common as one might expect. People heed moral and legal customs even when those customs are not enforced. “Even in the poorest neighborhoods,” James Q. Wilson observed in 1993, “a complete breakdown of law and order does not lead most people to engage in looting.”

Why, then, do people often act less knavishly than they could? Hume’s answer, developed across his published works, begins with his notion of human sociability. Social beings that we are, we take a natural interest in the opinions and sentiments of others. Through the repeated exercise of sympathy—by which we replicate what we take to be the emotional experience of others—we come to like what our peers like and dislike what they dislike. We bring our sense of others’ likes and dislikes to bear on our own actions and character. It pleases us to be the object of others’ approval; it pains us to become the subject of their disapproval.

Habitual sympathy gives rise to conscience: an internal faculty of self-assessment through which we govern ourselves in accordance with our sense of what others approve of, whether we are alone or in company. As habitual sympathy forms the conscience, habitual deference to conscience forms a more virtuous character. Virtuous character reduces the temptation of knavery because it merges one’s notion of personal advantage with notions of right conduct. Hume broadly agrees with Aristotle: the virtuous person both does and takes pleasure in what is right. The benefits of any material gains achieved through unethical means will be offset by the pain of self-disapproval. For the person of virtue, Hume wrote, “antipathy to treachery and roguery is too strong to be counterbalanced by any views of profit or pecuniary advantage.”

No one, of course, is perfectly virtuous. Most communities will have at least some members with seriously underdeveloped moral faculties—individuals who either do not know the difference between right and wrong or do not possess the basic desire to do what is right. And even the best among us will at times be seriously tempted to violate their own ethical standards. But most members of most human societies—certainly in developed societies in the 21st century—possess at least a basic level of virtue. Most people feel ashamed to be associated with dishonesty, fraud, and violence, and feel proud to be viewed as kind, polite, and self-sacrificial. When this ceases to be the case, society quickly unravels.

If people generally possess some degree of virtue—if they typically govern themselves in accordance with moral custom—why should our default assumption in politics be that every man is a knave? Should we not work from a more realistic model of human nature?

In the 20th century, scholars in the classical liberal tradition have offered various answers. Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom, suggested, in essence, that although not all men are knaves, political processes may select for the few knaves among us—the vicious outliers. Demagogues, extremists, and the morally unscrupulous are more likely to succeed in the political arena. The average person might not be especially knavish, but the average person in politics probably is. Those attracted to politics often have an attraction to power, and many of those attracted to power are overconfident in their views and insufficiently conscientious. The political process itself further sifts the field, bringing forth the least virtuous individuals from an already dubious subgroup of the population. Success in politics typically requires a good deal of moral compromise and ethical concession, and those willing to make such compromises are more likely than the average citizen to be knaves.

Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan argued that we ought to assume politicians are knaves given the large potential negative effects of even a few acts of political knavery. Political systems that do not guard against knavery at the highest level will not persist. A system that permits an energetic executive to suspend the constitution, for example, will not outlast a single ambitious demagogue. We should presumptively favor rules that prevent the worst men from doing the most harm rather than those that allow the best men to do the most good.

The most compelling answer, however, comes from Hume himself. Classical liberals have rightly grasped his maxim that we should suppose every man a knave when we think about politics, even though the maxim is, as Hume put it, “false in fact.” But the reasoning behind his position is often overlooked.

For Hume, we should assume knavery in our political reasoning because collective action—the core of political life—distorts judgment and encourages knavish behavior toward those outside our social groups. Political life, in other words, brings out the knavery in us. In democratic politics, ordinary people of apparently decent character come together and end up authorizing coercive acts of injustice and, in some cases, outright moral atrocities.

This problem becomes clearer when we return to the context of moral formation. Moral development occurs within specific social settings. Most people learn basic principles of fairness, honesty, and justice. They also learn, however, that those principles often apply differently depending on whether those affected are inside or outside their social groups. When the interests of our group are threatened—or when we perceive opportunities for group advancement—we are often willing to violate our own ethical standards. We readily commit, or support, morally dubious and even brazenly unethical acts when those primarily affected are not members of our group.

The most obvious example is warfare. Violence is not, and cannot be, the norm within our communities. Yet throughout history it has often been casually and knavishly pursued as a means of territorial expansion, aggrandizement, or domestic benefit. Citizens of war-waging nations are often content to authorize such acts. They may perceive them as advancing their interests. They generally have difficulty sympathizing with the suffering of distant victims. Perhaps most importantly, their moral contradictions are reinforced by the shared attitudes of their fellow citizens.

War is only one instance of the broader problem of collective action and groupthink in political life that Hume identifies. When we act in concert with a group, our judgment about the propriety of our ends becomes clouded by the fact that those ends are pursued collectively. Members of a party or interest group naturally approve of one another’s behavior, and that approval bolsters each member’s confidence in the rightness of his actions—even when those actions might otherwise seem ethically dubious. Each man “is sure to be approved of by his own party, for what promotes the common interest.” Convinced by this approval that we are serving the common good, we “soon learn to despise the clamours of adversaries.”

Few historical episodes illustrate this dynamic more vividly than the French Revolution. So convinced were the Jacobins that they embodied the will of the people—that they were the agents of true liberty, equality, and fraternity—that they became willing to execute not only their opponents but also their insufficiently radical allies. So convinced were they that they were democracy that they came to believe that democracy itself must be suppressed. As Simon Schama describes in Citizens, his history of the French revolution, “politics had to end that patriotism might conquer.”

The example of the French Revolution brings into focus the problem Hume identified. The danger in politics is not simply knavery; it is knavery dressed in self-righteousness—knavishness carried out by people genuinely convinced, and reinforced by their peers, that they are serving the common good, when they are in fact carrying out immoral and coercive acts on their fellow human beings.

Erik W. Matson is the Gibbons Fellow in Economics at the Catholic University of America and Co-Director of the Adam Smith Program at George Mason University.